Small but beautiful Edale in the Peak District is making its cultural mark, with successes in the worlds of music and books.

If anywhere was ever inspirational, it is this gentle hamlet in the wonderful bowl of Pennine hills where most walkers summon up their courage and set off up Grindsbrook Clough or Upper Booth on the 270-mile (430km) Pennine Way.

But it is very small, with a population at the last census of 316, so it's great that two of these have recently won fame. I'm hopeless at percentages but I think that's 0.6 recurring of the total, so well done Bella Hardy and Mark Wallington.

The latter is the author of The Uke of Wallington, an account of his tour of the UK with his ukelele, which must have driven some people mad but was generally a success. So much so, that BBC Radio 4 chose it as their Book of the Week last week.

The serialisation ended just nicely for the launch of this year's Edale Folk Festival which saw Mark reading from the book to neighbours on his home ground. Meanwhile Hardy chose the festival to launch her new album which is a series of love ballads to the Derbyshire Peak.

Lonely as a cloud. Or at least as a sheep. Edale Rocks, above the village and below Kinder summit. Photograph: The National Trust Photolibrary/Alamy

The tracks mix her own compositions with songs from a collection called The Ballads and Songs of Derbyshire, published in 1867, with titles such as Bradwell's Lost Daughter, The Drunken Butcher of Tideswell, Castleton Gypsies, Fin Cop, Peak Rhapsody, Ilam Lullaby and Lament for Derwent Village. The album itself is called The Dark Peak and the White, reflecting the different moods of the national park, whose authority gave Hardy a hand with a grant from its well-stewarded sustainable development fund.

Anyone who has been to Crowden in winter will know that it isn't all lambs and bluebells and gentle greenery in this part of the world.

Ilam church; the setting for one of Hardy's songs. Photograph: Alamy

Edale is conscious of these talents and appears to be nurturing new ones. A highlight of the recent commemoration of the Kinder Scout mass trespass in the valley was the lively presence of children from Edale primary school, in their pillar box-red sweaters and wearing masks of the birds, from peregrine falcons to red grouse, which live on the moors above them.

They were wide-eyed when told that their grandparents had been banned from much of the moorland because of spurious fears about the grouse and water catchments. Maybe the seeds of a story or a song, maturing in 2020, were sown.